Date Night: Gourmet Cheese Tasting

You may notice that most of our dates revolve around food and that's because....well, we really like food and it just makes us feel happy :)  Anyways, since we rarely have the opportunity to actually go out on a date (you know, where you have a babysitter and you leave the house) we try to have our dates on the weekends at home after the kids go to bed.  And after a while we realized that this at home dating program was resulting in the same date over and over again....A MOVIE. 

Me:(to my husband) "You want to have a date tonight?"

Him: "Yes, that would be great!"

Me: "OK, what could we do?"

LONG PAUSE

Him: "Um, we could watch a movie."

ANOTHER LONG PAUSE

Me: "Uh, OK"

We would then spend 30 minutes searching NetFlix for a good movie and finally just settle on something we weren't that interested in but we thought it would do and that was the date.

So, in search of something better this weekend we DID NOT WATCH A MOVIE!

We had a cheese tasting party and it was so much fun, and so relaxing.

So, if you're looking for something to do this weekend besides watch the screen in your PJ's here is what we did:

After all the kids were in bed we pulled out our gourmet cheeses (Okay, I bought the cheeses at Wal-Mart so some of you might not consider it gourmet. But, I did find some interesting cheeses near the deli and they were new to us.)  We put a white table cloth on the table, arranged our cheese along with some crackers and apples, lit a candle, and turned on some nice music.

Then we proceeded with the cheese tasting.  I had researched the proper cheese tasting techniques earlier in the day and found out some basics like:

1. Always taste starting with the mildest cheese and progressing to the strongest

2. There are certain words and categories that are used to evaluate cheese

I made a cheese tasting sheet along with some instructions that we used.  The most fun part was thinking up words to describe the aroma, taste, and texture of these new flavors.  We used a lot of the words from the evaluation sheet but also added in our own.  My favorites?...."stinky dirty socky" (it really smelled like that but it tasted pretty good) and "macaroni and cheesey" and "velveeta cheese gone bad".  Overall the cheeses were great (except one, bleah!) and the best part about it that we can use them for snacks and meals all week so it was a multipurpose date!

To download the instructions and evaluations sheet click here:

Cheese Tasting Evaluation Sheet and Instructions(PDF)